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Across much of Africa, the formal architecture of the democratic state - elections, constitutions, security sectors - has grown increasingly uncertain, marked by coups, contested transitions, and weakening civic space. This uncertainty is not the erosion of a previously complete sovereignty, but it exposes a structure of authority that was always plural. Religious brotherhoods, traditional councils, and community networks have long exercised forms of governance, mediation, and social order that never depended on the formal institutions of the state.
This panel invites paper analyzing these parallel power structures across historical, religious, social, gendered, and contemporary registers. Together, these contributions will ask whether “uncertain democracies” should be understood as institutional failure alone, or whether it reveals governance structures that were never solely state-centered. The panel welcomes papers engaging peacebuilding and civil society theories, with particular attention to how local, traditional and religious authorities interact with the contested state sovereignty in Africa.